note taking posted elsewhere

My comment was directed of course to Eric Schliesser. I'm aware of your professional interests. But since Antonin Scalia, who is required to be a historian of law, is known for stating that "the Constitution as I interpret it is a dead constitution" thereby collapsing the past into the present [and isn't that the definition of anti-historical argument?] I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to make the same observation about you; though you argue from the standpoint of the scientist rather than of someone raised on the political culture of reactionary Catholicism. And as I've mentioned before here I think, it's Panofsky, one of the last great figures of the German "tradition of art historical and literary historical criticism", who reminds us that the unification of the humanities and sciences was a hallmark of the Middle Ages, that their separation was central to the birth of the Renaissance, and that the contemporary urge for reunification (that you describe approvingly) is fundamentally reactionary: "If the anthropocratic civilization of the Renaissance is headed, as it seems to be, for a 'Middle Ages in reverse'..." Scalia's mistakes are yours, and they are serious. The differences between the two arguments are secondary. The relations your observe or create between people and ideas are a source of great pleasure for you. That pleasure is not a function of the people or ideas but of your relationship to them. You find certain things "meaningful". Meaningfulness is extrinsic to objects. As you collapse the past and present, you collapse objects and desires.

working for a living

David Murray Quartet

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: To Nicholas Kristof and other lousy Western libera...

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: To Nicholas Kristof and other lousy Western libera...: "I am getting sick and tired of those lousy Western liberals, like Kristof and other Zionists in NYT and WP, who invoke '22 Arab NGOs' for ..."

The intellectuals discuss unions and other intellectuals, the latter to avoid any substantive discussion of the issues those other intellectuals are chatting about. [Whether or not the others are doing a good job is irrelevant, since their arguments aren't mentioned] It's the same with CT's own discussion of Wikileaks, which almost entirely ignored the information released. And of course Wikileaks was a trigger for the Tunisian revolution about which they're also saying nothing.

Unions do not represent individual freedom, they restrain it. The community takes precedence. Unions are conservative. Academic/technocratic liberals are forced to invent ways to get around that fact before making their (always weak) defense of unionization.

The working class can only protect itself standing united; as individuals they fall. The American culture of individualism makes this hard for people to accept.

From yesterday

In order to ensure that no holds were barred, Washington and some members of the Saudi royal family encouraged the parliamentary majority to antagonize Hizballah, escalate its anti-Syrian rhetoric, and forge ties with the Syrian opposition. .....The Bush administration began tacitly (and, according to some reports, actively) supporting Saudi funding of militant anti-Shi’i (and anti-Alawi) Salafi groups in Lebanon as a means of making the breakdown of law and order in Lebanon more dicey for Asad. ....

Every fucking day is Friday

Marian Goodman continues to be one one of the best dealers in NY partly because she tries to come to terms with the conflicts between the old and new models of art; a conflict related to that between old and new models of journalism and media distribution. Fine art descends both from the monarchy and the high church, and relating itself to philosophy, deals in objects that carry pretensions to being something more than entertainment. Monetary value (of one of a kind objects) and philosophical value are related. This is why the mechanical reproduction of "art" precipitated a crisis. The art world has never come to terms with Shakespeare, just as philosophy has never come to terms with theater and "performance".

Pierre Huyghe


The current show includes a feature length film available only in an edition of 9, which is absurd. Does that detract from the film itself? What kind of film gets shown in an art gallery?  Questions for another day.

Goodman also represents Chantal Akerman, William Kentridge and Steve McQueen.


"Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only 'art' —not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well— but also, besides architecture, cartooning and 'commercial design,' the only visual art entirely alive.
Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” 1934

Nir Rosen on Israel, Iran, Egypt, and Arab/Persian, Sunni/Shia politics. He's wrong to think the Iranian government is in any danger from protests.

The Intellectuals continue their habit of discussing very seriously events that they now consider to be of great consequence. They're all very proud to be one step ahead of the NY Times.

Pat Lang on Qaddafi.
Read the comments on Lockerbie and Iran as well.

Atrios. Still a liberal

The Tremendous Social Cost Of Neighborhood Gentrification

First they came for the dive bars...

Still an asshole

Ian's Pizza

Place an order (state street location)

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Reassuring friendly tryants

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Reassuring friendly tryants: "Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived in Saudi Arabia on Sunday for the first stage of a Gulf tour to boost US relations with its allies in the region. "Part of what I want to accomplish is to reassure our friends and also just listen to what's on their mind," Mullen told journalists."

Egypt Supports Wisconsin

Arabist
"Scott 'Hosni' Walker",  and a statement by players for Green Bay.

Libya.

The Court, comprised three judges specialized in defamation and the Public Prosecutor. Being a criminal case within the Inquisitorial System, the case began by my interrogation by the President of the Court. I was essentially asked to explain the reasons for refusing to remove the article.
...The complainant was then subjected to the same procedure after which the lawyers made their (passionate) legal arguments. The Public Prosecutor then expressed her Opinion to the Court. I was allowed the last word. It was a strange mélange of the criminal and civil virtually unknown in the Common Law world. The procedure was less formal, aimed at establishing the truth, and far less hemmed down by rules of evidence and procedure. Due process was definitely served. It was a fair trial.

Here's the historical foundation between philosophical and legal culture in the Anglo American tradition. Most philosophy descends from Continental idealism, regarding both judicial authority and truth itself. "The other" where the subject comes up, is a product of the self-conscious anxiety of the interrogating philosopher/judge. In the adversarial legal and literary world I grew up in the other was an actual person: another lawyer, the prosecutor; a reader; a critic; your husband/wife. But I grew up around lawyers not legal philosophers.
Lawyers are neither priests nor scientists, they're performers.

"The procedure was less formal, aimed at establishing the truth, and far less hemmed down by rules of evidence and procedure."

That's the model of modernist authoritarianism right there, in the origins of modern philosophy.

Can you or Sterling give one example in history where a work of “speculative culture” has been remembered as anything more than a record, and therefore at its best a description, of the time of its production?

Below repeated from May 2008.








In re: Baudelaire on "Philosophic" Art.
Watchmen, and Alfred Rethel from 1849, and 1851. plus ça change

Didn't think of this at the time

That theorists and philosophy professors should be excited by "transgressive" readings only shows their anxiety concerning the future interpretations of their own writing. Rationalism is founded on intentionality, but history rereads everything. "Fair play" in scholarship (see the recent discussion of Heidegger) is irrelevant. The problem with comparing apples to oranges is not that it insults oranges but that it tells us nothing of interest.

Two examples of rereadings, not from trash fiction, rationalist in design, but from the high literature of the Constitution.

Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil argues that the decision was morally wrong but not technically incorrect.

What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said. Derrick Bell's essay is a dissent from the judgment itself.

The Merchant of Venice is predicated on the possibility of multiple readings. To call something "transgressive" is to give too much respect to the authority rebelled against.

And I said it all before but it bears repeating, now.

للقدس رايحين شهداء بالملايين -هتاف من ميدان التحرير

Should have posted this yesterday. Cairo. "To Jerusalem We go, to be the Martyrs in our Millions" Helena Cobban

Once again: Rationalism is founded on the doctrine of original intent.

One thing that fascinates me aesthetically is when people come up with interesting and plausible readings of a text that are consistent with everything the text says, but radically at odds with the author's intentions.

It still surprises me how supposedly liberal professors of philosophy - titling themselves "philosophers" as professors of chemistry are called "chemists"- begin with the logic of Nino Scalia.

"I'm shocked... Shocked!" to find ambiguity in that sentence.

So fucking stupid. That's why they spend their time reading crap literature: the literature of ideas, of content as opposed to form. To rationalists art is illustration.

"But I love you!"
"Just because you say it doesn't make it true."
"Yes it does!"

Bureaucracy is a formal system; the system is foundational to what it produces.
---

Update (from the past). I'll repeat myself (again).
Brad DeLong:

THERE ARE NO ATTRACTIVE MODERN CONSERVATIVES BECAUSE CONSERVATISM SIMPLY IS NOT ATTRACTIVE. DEAL WITH IT!!

And again:

[Y]ou have to either live in the countryside or live in the city and be really rich to say that rubber tomatoes suck. For those humans who live in the city and are not really rich, rubber tomatoes provide a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience.

Brad Delong thinks he's not a conservative, but he's redefined liberalism to include conservative arguments.
Rationalists rationalize.

Haaretz: "Israel 'deeply appreciates' U.S. veto on UN resolution condemning settlements."

It's no longer possible logically to call Israel a democracy.

Obama is an idiot and an asshole.

Every day is Friday.

back working for a living

NYT

First, Bahrain is a Shiite island. You won’t see it described that way, but it is — 70 percent of the population, more than the percentage of Shiites in Iraq. And like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, these Arab Shiites have been systematically discriminated against, repressed, and denied meaningful roles by a Sunni tribal government determined to maintain its solid grip on the country. The emergence of real democracy, as in Iraq, will push the country over into the Shiite column — sending shivers down the spines of other Gulf rulers, and especially in Riyadh.

...Washington is now faced again with another hard choice — the legacy of shortsighted decisions made over decades: Continue to go with local repressive regimes out of a misguided sense of “American interests”? Hold on to unpopular military bases at all costs — thereby deepening local anger and perhaps giving Iran ultimately a greater voice in events?

Or should it quietly drop support for this repressive regime, allow events to take their course and accept that long-overdue change is coming? How long can we hold on to another ugly status quo? It’s really about how bad the change will get the longer we wait.

The Guardian

Bahrain's security forces are the backbone of the Al Khalifa regime, now facing unprecedented unrest after overnight shootings. But large numbers of their personnel are recruited from other countries, including Jordan, Pakistan and Yemen.

Tanks and troops from Saudi Arabia were also reported to have been deployed in support of Bahraini forces.

Precise numbers are a closely guarded secret, but in recent years the Manama government has made a concerted effort to recruit non-native Sunni Muslims as part of an attempt to swing the demographic balance against the Shia majority – who make up around 65% of the population of 1 million.

FLC Wikileaks

SECRET SUBJECT: IRAN ELECTIONS; DISARRAY IN BOTH CONSERVATIVE AND REFORMIST CAMPS; ....Reformists seemed divided and adrift, with no clear focus for aspirations, an uncertain message beyond criticism of Ahmedinejad, and poor prospects for electoral victory.

Also the Leveretts on protests today in Iran.

Wikileaks again: Al Jazeera

Leaked US cables show that Australia sees the Iranian nuclear programme as a "deterrent," a sharply contrary view to that of most Western countries. The leaks also reveal that Australia doesn't share the assessment that Iran is a "rogue state."

Also, Australian intelligence agencies fear Israel may launch a military strike on Iran to knock out its nuclear facilities, which they said could trigger a nuclear war, leaked US diplomatic cables have shown.

Iraq: "Curveball" says he lied
more

"The primacy of the theoretical."

Dream on.

Arabist

This isn't 1952, but Egyptian democrats should still be wary.

Reuters

Egypt's new military rulers will issue a warning on Sunday against anyone who creates "chaos and disorder", an army source said.

The Higher Military Council will also ban meetings by labour unions or professional syndicates, effectively forbidding strikes, and tell all Egyptians to get back to work after the unrest that toppled Hosni Mubarak.

More on managed social capitalism.

Freedom doesn't exit. There are only various forms of unfreedom. Or, as I've said a few times, if you believe it exists then the only examples are sociopaths and babies rolling around happily in their own shit. But neither sociopaths nor babies live very long on their own. Both are defined by the presence of others.

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Wael Ghonim: "I was told that he wrote this on Twitter: 'Dear Western Governments, You've been silent for 30 years supporting the regime that was oppress..."

From Tony Karon, on politics and football: "To the struggling people of Algeria"


[I feel obliged to add] And on his chest the word: SIEMENS.
Another layer to the poetry; the individual and the collective in capitalism.

It is possible to have a macroscopic view -formal, poetic, and distant- simultaneously with a social and cultural one. Wölfflin uses the former denigrating the latter by his interest in "esthetics". Yet to see social implications and relationships is not necessarily to be enslaved by them. The relationships between the Hellenic period and the Baroque (and late capitalism?) are as much (more) esthetic as (than) anything else.

Feb 27 1991

With all the force of the celebration it may be hard for the military to hold on. The US can't be seen now to countenance terror, and the protests from the beginning have been organized, and the activists politically mature. It's a bourgeois revolution and they're hard to destroy. And if there's no chaos there's no need for the army to impose order. Their claims to authority will be treated as insults. A functioning dictatorship requires a large segment of a population to agree to be treated as children. I don't know if that exists in Egypt now.

There is no Egyptian government now.

Having listened to the statement of the armed forces spokesman; I presume that was General Anan. I would say that we now have a military junta in charge in Egypt. HM's departure after resignation leaves no law in Egypt except the will of the Egyptian generals. Under the present Egyptian constitution the speaker of the house succeeds to the presidency on resignation of the president. That did not happen. Mubarak's authority did not extend beyond his resignation. We could have had a constitutional succession but that is dead and gone as a possibility now. Now there is an extra-legal, extra-constitutional regime in charge governing under the authority of NO law. The junta has dissolved the parliament and fired the cabinet. The emergency law is no longer needed. The only law is the will of the generals. Since he was not mentioned in today's statement, I would think that Omar Suleiman will have little or no role. Let us hope that the generals are benevolent. 1952 comes to mind. The Egyptian Armed forces have only two political traditions. 1- They overthrew the monarchy in a similar soft coup in 1952 and 2- They have ruled Egypt ever since.

I just heard someone ask Robert Gibbs if Obama had called anyone in Egypt since the resignation. Who would he call, the head of the junta?

The revolution is not over

One of the least convincing slogans in Tahrir Square has been ‘the people and the army, standing together’. One can hardly blame the protesters for expressing this hope: it was, arguably, a necessary fiction, without which millions of people would not have dared to turn out to call for Mubarak to stand down. The army played its cards well. Under strong pressure from Robert Gates, it did not fire on demonstrators, and, after Mubarak’s non-resignation speech yesterday – a fantastic tribute to the powers of self-deception – it finally decided to wash its hands of him. But the army did not join the movement, either: a critical phase in classical revolutions. And the communiqués issued by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces of Egypt have been ambiguous at best, full of vague promises and calls for people to return home. Certainly they indicate no conversion to the principle of civilian rule. The supreme council, now at the helm of power, was chosen and shaped by Mubarak; its chairman is Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, described in a 2008 WikiLeaks cables as ‘aged and change-resistant’. It is not a description that inspires confidence.

As usual:
Arabist, FLC, AA.

Interesting how leftists want to see the protests in Egypt as anti-capitalist.

Responding to someone else on Facebook: "This is part of a slowly developing but huge shift in the political cultures of the Middle East. Monarchies and dictators are now scared. US and Israeli and Europhile support [colonialist, anti-democratic and "anti-capitalist" in the sense that its defenders define capitalism] for monarchies and dictatorships is being overwhelmed by the newly aspirant Arab middle classes. It's a widespread capitalist revolution, slow-moving until recently; a modern revolution without 'modernist', utopian fantasies."

Interesting also that US connections to the Egyptian military are discussed openly by some people and not others.
The administration is not sitting around and waiting, they're working as hard as they can.

From Tony Karon on F-book. [I'm lazy]
Suleiman: The CIA's man in Cairo - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Wael Ghonim.
The Googlization of Everything

Nike won the Vietnam war, now Google and Facebook will win the Middle East. I said it before: The US is defending fascism against neoliberalism in the interest of its own hegemony. Nation states are losing the war against international capital.

"Cairo joke of the day!"

Mubarak croaks and goes to that huge 'deceased waiting room', where he meets Nasser and Sadat. They ask him: "so? What was it? Poison or a bullet." he sighs and shakes his head saying: "facebook!"

As'ad AbuKhalil

Amer sent me this: "And [Egyptian protesters are] more authentic and individualistic and natural, they do not attempt to perform for the West as much as the Lebanese. They are also less organized and directed, unlike both sides in Lebanon, they do not do north korean tricks and draw images and flags with their bodies. But make no mistake, the westernized middle class is the same everywhere."

The westernized middle class is the same everywhere.

The National (Page 2/2): "US hedges bets but insists on need for Egyptian reform."

Also Douthat, who's more honest than most defenders of the US position.

FLC
Wikileaks:[2008] "...A 'hot line' set up between the MOD & Omar Soliman is now in daily use..."

Regarding the Tahdiya [calm], Hacham said Barak stressed that while it was not permanent, for the time being it was holding. There have been a number of violations of the ceasefire on the Gaza side, but Palestinian factions other than Hamas were responsible. Hacham said the Israelis assess that Hamas is making a serious effort to convince the other factions not to launch rockets or mortars. Israel remains concerned by Hamas' ongoing efforts to use the Tahdiya to increase their strength, and at some point, military action will have to be put back on the table....

In terms of atmospherics, Hacham said the Israeli delegation was "shocked" by Mubarak's aged appearance and slurred speech. Hacham was full of praise for Soliman, however, and noted that a "hot line" set up between the MOD and Egyptian General Intelligence Service is now in daily use. Hacham said he sometimes speaks to Soliman's deputy Mohammed Ibrahim several times a day. Hacham noted that the Israelis believe Soliman is likely to serve as at least an interim President if Mubarak dies or is incapacitated. (Note: We defer to Embassy Cairo for analysis of Egyptian succession scenarios, but there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Soliman.)

Swoop, via FLC:

"With the course of the crisis still far from settled, US is quietly stepping up its interactions with Saudi Arabia, passing assurances to the Saudi monarchy that the US unwillingness to support President Mubarak does not imply that the US any hesitation to support the Saudi leadership if confronted by a similar challenge."

Who Is Omar Suleiman?

Lots more today at FLC

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: King of Jordan

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: King of Jordan: "'The conversation, at a private home by request, was about politics. What did these Bedouins of the Zubeidi clan, a backbone of Jordan’..."

Suleiman
The US is trying to bypass ElBaradei, as insufficiently pro-Israel.

Threading the needle

Yet there is one more thing we can learn from the events in Egypt, aside from the fragility of the region we inhabit, and it is something that’s not easy to digest: The Western world’s and mostly America’s treachery. We learned that the way they abandoned President Mubarak and gave him the cold shoulder can happen to us too. Or in other words, we cannot count on the Americans at a time of crisis.

The author is an Israeli liberal.

Egypt's heroic dead.

"Condoleezza, Condoleezza, please bring to Mubarak a visa."

Joshua Marshall

You have to know the euphemisms and lingo of the Israel-Palestine issue to get what he's saying. But Mike Huckabee seems to be saying that solution to the conflict is for the Palestinians to leave what's now called the "West Bank" and have "the Arabs" find them a piece of land from the "vast amounts of territory that are in the hands of Muslims, in the hands of Arabs."

In other words, expulsion or what's sometimes euphemistically called "transfer".

[repeat] His friend Matthew Yglesias in 2002

After the last depressing news from the Middle East I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied terroritories. [sic] The result would probably be out-and-out war with the neighboring Arab states, but Israel could win that.

M.J. Rosenberg now blames AIPAC for putting Israel on the wrong side of history, by supporting Arab dictators. A couple of years ago he said Israel should make deals with dictators when it could, because Arab democracies would never agree to Israeli terms. Going back further, on Oct 9 2006 he wrote: "I want the occupation to end, which means negotiating an end to it with the Palestinians whether we like them or not, and thereby preserving a majority Jewish state called Israel forever." He later deleted the post.
The beginning but not the post is at archive.org

And again, Josh Marshall and Yigal Allon
---
update:

The ire in Tahrir Square is full of ironies, not the least of which is the American president who inspired such hope in the Middle East with his Cairo speech calling around this week to leaders in the region to stanch the uncontrolled surge of democracy in the Arab world.

Josh Marshall? Atrios? Matthew Yglesias?
MoDo the hack.

smart

Qatar-based news service Al Jazeera has a long relationship with Creative Commons licensing. Now, for its coverage of the Egyptian uprising, it has released photographs via Flickr and video on a CC license.

link

Neoconservative support for fascists does nothing but slow down the spread of neoliberalism.
The spread of protests are a result of globalization of communication. And in Egypt they were started by teenagers, the prime target demographic.

FLC

"There is no aspect of scientific knowledge that mandates institutionalized instrumental reason in all aspects of life. There is no telos to the world beyond entropy, and even that puts too much of a glow on physical events. The 18th century was the age of enchantment with science, an enchantment morphing over time into various forms of a philosophy along a line also described in the arts, which themselves describe (again) not the world but our perceptions of it. Equality in the language of philosophy originates in the discovery or construction, by members of an elite, of the idea of equality, rather than in the recognition of the practice of it by the people, and has ended in the study of people by that same elite not as equal but alike: the study of each of us only in terms of the aggregate. And in this the logic of individualism becomes its opposite, except that the elite observers have quietly removed themselves from the game. The greatest heroes of technocracy are those who can predict the behavior of the middling and in this they have become middling themselves. But it’s these heroes who are left to make the decisions for the rest of us. This is the model of society founded on not on democracy but on the “imperatives” of research and progress.

The absolute unity of purpose is the end of social life. I’ve called these fantasies the theater of science but they’re also of course the theater of aspiration, with the same conflicted relation of form to subject that found in Plato’s dialogues and the story of Moses and Aaron: the paradox of oratory against rhetoric, the argument via the neutral -dead- medium of language, across subjectivities, for absolute value."

"Jolly Division!" Via Tony Karon

SOTU.
The world is looking elsewhere at the moment.

In the history of absurdity.
Palestinians condemn US plan to settle refugees in South America

The Palestine Papers

In Israel as in the US, liberal defense of conservative policy did no more than encourage conservative moves to the right.

Conservatives believe everyone acts on reflex. They live down to their own expectations and then use their own behavior to confirm their own assumptions.

The first principle of liberalism is that liberals are nice people. With the best intentions, sincerity trumps logic. Liberal Zionism was always an oxymoron.

Liberal passivity more than conservative aggression is responsible for the current politics of the US. The same passivity will result in the end of the Jewish state.

Note-taking/record-keeping. More comments made elsewhere

A social ecosystem is a grouping of complex and antagonistic subsystems. The market and market relations are a subsystem. If you want to argue that the market or the practical instrumentalism of life strengthens social bounds and society be testing, that's fine. If you want to argue that technocratic liberals put theory before practice when it's clear that practice always precedes theory, as fiddle playing preceded the philosophy of it, then again you have a point. But if you want to use the market as a general model then you're not paying attention. The behavior foundational to democracy preceded the theory of democracy and the practice of the Scandinavian model of sociability and economic activity preceded the naming of what we call Social Democracy, just as the practice in Hollywood in the late 40's of making cheap B/W films shaded with antisocial desires preceded the naming of Film Noir by cineastes from a different country. And that's why the films of the Coen brothers, students of students, and of Film Noir more than of the films themselves, are thought of as mannered and "over-determined." Art and society are always avant la lettre.

Philosophy qua philosophy is la lettre.

Friday Fucking Lunch Club

Tony Karon

Nir Rosen

Noted by someone else but now in my records. Matthew Yglesias at the beginning of his brilliant career. 2002

After the last depressing news from the Middle East I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied terroritories. [sic] The result would probably be out-and-out war with the neighboring Arab states, but Israel could win that.
All forced population transfers are humanitarian disasters, of course, but so is the current situation. It's not like there's not any room in the whole Arab world for all these Palestinian Arabs to go live in, it's just that the other Arab leaders don't want to cooperate.

Less philosophy, less theory, less political science. More history.
Please.
--
update: please

Note taking
Posted elsewhere rewritten slightly/still sloppy.

"the mathematics that is adequate to everyday life"
Mathematics is not adequate to everyday life. The experience of individuals is irreducible in the understanding of others.

The limits of philosophy are not the limits of thought. Philosophy concerns names not experience. Connoisseurship concerns the appreciation of distinctions that can be communicated only imprecisely. The philosopher Paul Grice discussed implicature. [the action of implying a meaning beyond the literal sense of what is explicitly stated, e.g., saying the frame is nice and implying I don't like the picture in it.] Are actors now supposed to give him credit for explaining why they all want to perform plays by Shakespeare, or why we watch and compare performances over and over again of the same texts!? Philosophers, Derrida included, consider literature "parasitic" but the focus on aperspectival truth leads to a philosophy of prescription. The limits of thought: why we have prosecutors and defense attorneys, paid factotums [actors again] and an adversarial system of justice. Rationalists prefer the inquisitorial system that credits their own sense of reason. The limits of thought: can you translate Mallarmé into English? No you cannot. Can you experience my life? No you cannot. The practice of fiddle playing precedes the philosophy of it.

The primary focus in democracy is not on objects or self or other but on relation between them. "Imperfect justice" is the result of a process whereby two agents loyal to their own bias and to process perform before an audience. I can see how Deleuze et al are trying to justify in terms of rationalism the necessity of empiricism but this reads as the desperate communalism of individualists. That's the tragedy of the hippies. Philosophy as such is individualist in the same sense that the rationalist defense of empiricism is not the practice of it. The focus on ideals and idealisms strengthens (as performative) esthetics that in the political world manifest as authoritarianism.

How can a prosecutor imagine him/her self as anything but 1/2 of a relation? How can an actor exist without at audience? Lawyers and actors, and historians, are craftspeople performing actions judged and contextualized by others, and as such neither irrationalist nor individualist.

As an aside, it's interesting that the reviewer of the book on Habermas [discussed on the same page here] argues for respecting original intent:
"Why does he deem it necessary to read Habermas’s philosophical lecture as containing a coded reference? Is something gained in this discovery?"

The return to humanism in modernity is a return to process over a fixation on objects and product. The desperation of DG is a part of that process of change. Again: the children of Luther and Descartes are not humanists. Humanism begins not in science (or the analogies of science as scientism) but history.

Tunisia, Lebanon, etc.
The people who claimed that the Wikileaks releases didn't amount to much chose to ignore the middle east.
FLC and...
AA

AlJazeera versus Al-Arabiyyah TV
An experienced and knowledgeable Western correspondent in the Middle East (who is fluent in Arabic), sent me this: "The comparison between Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya now that bin Ali has gone is interesting: alJazeera frames the issue now as about removing all vestiges of the former regime, al-Arabiya wants to preserve it. Najwa al-Qassem harangued rights activist Radia al-Nasraoui saying how can you get rid of a whole generation of ruling class?? Radia responded: "it's as if you're saying our fate is to be ruled by these people.""
Posted by As'ad at 8:43 AM Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz

Bin Ali and Israel: from the Clinton years
"Earlier today in a separate meeting with Foreign Minister Ben Yahia, I expressed our appreciation for the tireless efforts of President Ben Ali of Tunisia in advancing the peace process. Now by establishing these new ties with Israel, Tunisia has once again demonstrated its commitment to the peace process. The foreign minister and I also discussed threats against Tunisia. I told him that the United States would take such threats very seriously, and that we are committed to a stable and secure Tunisia." (thanks Mick)
Posted by As'ad at 8:42 AM Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz

France and Tunisia
After insulting the Tunisian people by offering security equipment to Bin Ali when the movement first started, today France discovered that it has embarrassed itself. It now talks about respecting the Tunisian people. Too little too late. This is like...Obama when he expressed respect for the Tunisian people minutes after the plane of Bin Ali had left the country.
Posted by As'ad at 8:39 AM Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz

Arab nationalism is NOT dead (tell that to Fouad Ajami)
Ever since Ajami wrote that lousy article on the death of Arab nationalism, lazy Western analysts and journalists readily believed him. I have often argued otherwise. If you have been following in Arabic the news coverage and particularly the noise of the Arab youth on Facebook and Twitter you would not have doubted that common Arab political and emotional sentiments are still shared by the Arab people. Most Arabs on Facebook have put the Tunisian flag or the picture of Muhammad Bouazizi as the profile picture.
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On Tunisian Revolution vesus Iranian
Some have sent me asking for reasons for my enthusiasm for the Tunisian Revolution and not for the so-called Green (Early Khumayni) Revolution. Silly ones have suggested reasons having to do with the Arab identity of Tunisians. 1) The last notion is silly. I have been most critical of the Lebanese Cedar Revolution and wrote more against it than about any lousy Revolution, and the Lebanese are Arabs. 2) I judge a revolution by its sponsors: the sponsors of the Lebanese and Green Revolution are US, France, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. 3) I judge the movement by its leaders: Hariri and Musavi and Rafsanjani don't inspire my enthusiasm. The Tunisian Communist Workers Party does. 4) There is no sectarian or religious slogans in the Tunisian movement, while there is plenty in the Green and Cedar revolutions. 5) I like revolutions that concerns Israel and not those that please Israel. 6) I never denied that there are sincere people and youths in the camp of the Green Revolution but that it is led by lousy individuals who raised lousy slogans: (Mousavi and Rafsanjani wanted to go to the early Khumayni "purity" or revolution. That is it.

Aljazeera plus Al-Akhbar plus Wikileaks and Tunisia
Comrade Kamal is right: The brave Tunisian people, Aljazeera (even with a relatively restraint coverage), Al-Akhbar (though its translation and dissemination of the Wikileaks document on corruption in the government), and Wikileaks did Bin `Ali in.
Posted by As'ad at 6:17 PM Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Google Buzz

Readymade: Portrait of an old friend.

"Former friends have recounted that Loughner had a fixation for grammar and words, saying that he challenged Giffords at a previous public meeting with the impenetrable question: 'What is government if words have no meaning?' "
---
"A felt need for meant entities may derive from an earlier failure to appreciate that meaning and reference are distinct. Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated from the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognizing as the business of the theory of meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned."
W.V.O. Quine.
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"Einstein tells the story of how Gödel called the game theorist Morgenstern on the evening of his citizenship interview in the United States, to explain how he had discovered a logical problem in the Constitution: a non-standard model that would enable a dictatorship to be created consistently with it. After a period of ill health, he effectively starved himself to death for fear that he was being poisoned."
Entry for Gödel in Simon Blackburn's Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
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"[T]he Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead — or, as I prefer to put it, enduring. It means today not what current society (much less the Court) thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted."
Antonin Scalia

No word has meaning, each has meanings. Logicians don't understand language, they replace the Platonism of religious authority with the Platonism of numbers, and Quine's holism has the same effect. Scientists are not science; if science is a tool, philosophy must be concerned with the nature of the tool user. Holism, absent the social function of language and thus still "reductionist", is a metaphysical article of faith. His naturalism is anti-political and his politics were predictably lousy.

The only way to eliminate meanings, or freeze them, is to eliminate interpretation as subjective and therefore illogical. The only way to eliminate subjectivity from our experience of social and therefore political life is to lie. Taruskin and Balkin again. And as long as we're on the subject of music, it makes sense that Willard Quine's nephew was a musical puritan and junky.
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It's not that Quine's holism is an act of faith as much as that he uses it to defend his faith in philosophy as an independent subject. His arguments are fundamentally perverse: a moralizing defense ex cathedra of the idea of pragmatism, which encouraged the continuing practice of its opposite.
--

This ended up the beginning of a new tag: Kurt Gödel meet David Addington, though I brought in the Addington reference later. It made me smile that the only other reference I've found to the two of them is in a paper by Balkin and Levinson. Linked here

As ever, FLC

A commentor at Crooked Timber, damning me with faint praise

But he’s also basically right on a fairly standard account. Works-of-art involve “ideas” in the Kantian sense, but not in the sense that their “ideas” can be cashed out or encapsulated in standardly cognitive concepts. (And the extent to which they can be so encapsulated counts against the quality of such works, renders them mechanical rather than “organic”,- which, incidentally, is part of the standard objection to allegory). Yes, their reading/reception involves a “play” of our cognitive faculties, but in the mode of reflective and not determinate judgment, as purposeful purposelessness, not subservient to referential functioning.

"Works of art" as opposed to other things, like the Constitution?
Does Nino Scalia lie to himself or only to others?
Repeats: Brad DeLong fundamentalist.
More recently: Richard Taruskin and Jack Balkin.

If it's not written in numerical form, you can't cash it. Nothing "means" now what it "meant" in the past. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, absent later amendments, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Beethoven's Eroica are not now what they were in 1805. Nothing in the future will "mean" what it does now.

I'm not going to leave this up for long. It's not worth it.
---
Maybe I will.

Economists debate ethics

“What disciplines economics, like any science, is whether your work can be replicated. It either stands up or it doesn’t. Your motivations and whatnot are secondary.”

Eric Schliesser: "It is always fine to hear economists pretend that financial incentives do not matter."

It would be nice to hear philosophers agree that culture does. Philosophy and economics both pretend to be sciences

The history of modern intellectual life, more even than the history of modernity itself, needs to be written by a historian from Mars. The sociological “history of the present” doesn’t describe the present any more than cognitive science describes the mind. Their processes are akin politically to discussions among whites about the negro problem or men asking “what do women want?” The history of modern Judaism can not be understood without a history of Palestine written by Palestinians. Absent that the best we’ll get is the equivalent of the feminism exclusively of men.

Still working.
More, from the conclusion. I've quoted the passage from Panofsky's essay before but not in this context.

Another example: The logic of modern economic thought begins in acknowledging our tendency towards self-interest, and this understanding has led to a realist acceptance of it. But without an internal adversarialism the result has been a hypertrophied individualism. The optimism of scientific understanding has resulted in an optimism of greed. “Greed exists” becomes “greed is good” which simply reinforces greed without understanding what it does. Here’s Panofsky in his essay on film.

While it is true that commercial art is always in danger of ending up as a prostitute, it is equally true that noncommercial art is always in danger of ending up as an old maid. Non commercial art has given us Seurat's "Grande Jatte" and Shakespeare's sonnets, but also much that is esoteric to the point of incommunicability. Conversely, commercial art has given us much that is vulgar or snobbish (two aspects of the same thing) to the point of loathsomeness, but also Durer's prints and Shakespeare's plays. For, we must not forget that Durer's prints were partly made on commission and partly intended to be sold in the open market; and that Shakespeare's plays -in contrast to the earlier masques and intermezzi which were produced at court by aristocratic amateurs and could afford to be so incomprehensible that even those who described them in printed monographs occasionally failed to grasp their intended significance— were meant to appeal, and did appeal, not only to the select few but also to everyone who was prepared to pay a shilling for admission.

It is this requirement of communicability that makes commercial art more vital than noncommercial, and therefore potentially much more effective for better or for worse.

Greed is an astringent, but it’s not the only one there is. And the work Panofsky praises—Durer and Shakespeare—is not the simplest or most one sided but the most divided within itself. The most telling contradiction in the academic celebration of self-interest is that the academy itself is founded on a collaborative ethic and an ideal of disinterested reason, and it’s this that is claimed as a foundation for the understanding of the pervasiveness of its opposite. The objective elite of scientists/judges prescribes and regulates the subjectivism of others.

More old/new. Still working. [PDF] [and here It's changed a lot in the years since] 

Yves Saint Laurent was three when he pointed out to his aunt that her shoes and dress didn’t match. His statement can be designated a truth in the terms of the system in which he had already, and precociously, educated himself. But systems are always changing and are always in the process of becoming. Society is always changing and representational systems ossify into formal systems that outlast their role as representation. Forms are still used even as they become brittle. And as I described in Manet and Picasso, and now with Duchamp, this is the crisis that defines modern art, which is no more or less than the art of a culture in crisis. Sometimes forms are taken up in new ways, as in Duchamp’s literary objects. Sergei Eisenstein’s favorite author was Dickens. With film the 19th century tradition moved onto a different track, so in art school we studied Vertov. Man with a Movie Camera was adopted as an example of the fine art—non-narrative—avant-garde, by which definition Eisenstein in inverse relation to his actual importance, was a maker of popular film.

Eliot’s poetry as is memorial, describing a desire to hold on to what one loves even after it’s dead. But he found a strange way to bring the dead to life. He used modern forms to describe an anti-modern philosophy and he ended up leaving behind one of the greatest descriptions that we have of the interior life of a modern conservative. If G.A. Cohen had the clarity of Eliot, he could have written a great novel about the dream and failure of communism in the west. And he would have been able to give communism a better defense than he did. What he lacked was an ability to articulate his own tragedy. He and his work will end in obscurity because both will be useless to history.

The abolitionist John Brown was a political vanguardist, avant-garde and outlier, and a more directly moral man than Lincoln. But the fact that Brown was right, simply and straightforwardly, in his absolute condemnation of slavery and slaveholders doesn’t make him a more important man. Lincoln’s moderation, his political and rhetorical expertise, even considered as partially corrupt, make him the more complex figure, precisely because Lincoln could communicate with those for whom Brown would have no patience. Lincoln was more representative of the complexities of the white, and majority, American imagination.

Brown’s politics was the fanaticism of the slaveholder’s brother, not the anger of the slave. Frederick Douglass thought the raid on Harper’s Ferry was much too dangerous. The genius of Lincoln stems from his relationships, belonging to the dominant party—moderate only in its own terms—of white America, and to the dominant language of American culture. That’s not a defense of Lincoln over Brown, or of corrupt moderation over radical action; both played their part. But any complex defense of either of them, including the possibility that Brown’s last raid was not foolhardy but a suicide mission, with the intent of driving the nation towards a final civil war, would have to be among other things, a defense of their self-awareness and of their political art. Both are important in the sense that Demoiselles d’Avignon is important: as useful to our understanding of history. But we return to them not to find answers but to ask questions that are still relevant to us, about emotions and moral responsibility, about our relations to each other.

My discussion to Harper’s Ferry and suicide missions is not the same as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s claim that the attacks on New York in 2001 were a work of art, let alone a great one. The attack was no more than spectacular stunt that killed thousands of people and led nowhere. It was in a very real way anti-political: a “fuck you”, “epater le bourgeois!” and it’s precisely the old avant-garde assumption that such violence is or ever could be an artistic gesture that allowed Stockhausen to say something so stupid. Taking Brown’s last acts seriously, as political strategy, the clear parallel is to Hamas, who are neither romantic idealists nor nihilists, but are committed as most experts agree to very specific and limited political goals. Hamas. like John Brown, and unlike al Qaeda are engaged.

The image of Palestinians in the western imagination is a perfect contemporary example of change in normative language. Over 30 years Palestinians have moved from absence to presence in our culture, while little about their own experience has changed at all. And any sociological analysis of that change in our perceptions would have to cover the entire political spectrum. Culture functions through relations of distance and proximity. Palestinian absence in the west was physical. But for Israel where they’ve always been physically present the most universal parallel is simple enough: the presence and absence of women. The original shock and continuing ambiguity of Manet’s Olympia has to do with the full presence of the central figure. She’s looking directly at us, without being very interested. The boredom itself was once shocking. But Manet made art out of the indifference of a naked whore the same way Duchamp made art out of a urinal, by moving something that was always in the world, from the background of our experience to the foreground. The change for Palestinians has been slow but simple moral logic has played no bigger a role from 1947 to 2010 than it did in 1860. The new Palestinian presence has allowed us to engage them and their experience for the first time. The Palestinian problem, modeled on the Jewish, Negro, or Woman, problems, has become the Israeli-Palestinian problem. But acknowledgement is no more than that. There is no way to work outside of time, to shorten the process of assimilation by imagining as philosophers do, an oxymoronic aperspectival view. All we can do is demonstrate the uselessness of arrogant presumption and the rhetoric of truth, and argue for replacing them, not with a fallacious truth of rhetoric, but the truth of process.

Adding more to the paper. Why not post it here.

"If the anthropocratic civilization of the Renaissance is headed, as it seems to be, for a 'Middle Ages in reverse'... " Erwin Panofsky wrote those words in 1955, in the introduction to a collection of his essays. The introduction, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline”, is a resigned but damning criticism of the culture of instrumentalization, so it’s fitting that his definition of humanism now seems largely forgotten. In the older originating definition of the term, Erasmus was the humanist, not Luther; now Luther’s descendants are called humanists. Looking over the literature on Pollock, from Greenberg on, the references to the “Gothic” aren’t surprising. It’s become clear to me where my childhood associations of Pollock and Uccello begin. But you have to look farther into the past or to historians, not philosophers or theorists of the present to understand the implications. The reconstruction of humanism begins with a return to history, and a focus not on how various forms are distinct, isolated from one another, but how they’re related: tied together. I’ll end this with another passage from Clark, from Farewell to an Idea, the beginning of the chapter on Pollock: on Flaubert and Pollock and the fantasies of Modernism in modernity. You’ll hear echoes of Henry James on Eliot and of Bourdieu and Greenberg in their faithful taking of people at their word, following others’ fantasies as ideas rather than as descriptions of desire (and as echoes of/in a closet). As a critique of Bourdieu, [here] the passage is devastating

Farai un vers de dreit nien:
non er de mi ni d'autra gen,
non er d'amor ni de joven,
ni de ren au,
qu'enans fo trobatz en durmen,
sus un chivau.

(I shall make a poem out of [about] nothing at all:/it will not speak of me or others,/of love or youth, or of anything else,/for it was composed while I was asleep/riding on horseback.)

William IX of Aquitaine

Once Upon a Time. When I first came across the lines by the duke of Aquitaine some years ago, naturally I imagined them in Jackson Pollock’s mouth. They put me in mind of modernism; or of one moment of modernism which I realized I had been trying (and failing) to get in focus ever since I had read Harmonium or looked at Le Bonheur de vivre. Two things were clarified. Not just that modern artists often turned away from the detail of the world in order to revel in the work of art's "essential gaudiness," but that the turning away was very often associated with a class attitude or style not unlike Duke William's, or, at least, an attempt to mimic that style - its coldness, brightness. lordliness, and nonchalance. Its "balance, largeness, precision, enlightenment, contempt for nature in all its particularity."' Its pessimism of strength.

You might expect such an effort at aristocratic world-weariness on the part of bourgeois and even petty-bourgeois artists, operating in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries not the eleventh and twelfth, to bear some strange fruit.

Largeness and lordliness, after all, were not likely to be these artists' forte. Take the novelist Gustave Flaubert, for (central) example, at the beginning of work on Madame Bovary in 1852: already chafing at the he bit of reference that seemed to come with the form he had chosen and dreaming of "a book a about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would he held together by the internal strength of its style ... a book which would have almost no subject or at least where the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible.” What strikes me as truly strange in Flaubert's case is not so much the project he outlined for himself - though as an ambition for a novel rather than a sestina or a set of haiku it has its own pathos – as the distance between the book he imagined and the one he actually wrote. No book has ever been fuller than Madame Bovary of the everything external which is the bourgeois world. Fuller in its heart of hearts, I mean; fuller in its substance; in the weight it gives to words themselves. It is as if the more intense a bourgeois artist's wish to dispense with externals and visibilities, the stronger will be their hold an the work's pace, structure, and sense of its own objectivity. Or maybe we could say that what brings on the word "bourgeois" at all as a proper description of Madame Bovary is exactly the deadlock within it between a language so fine and cold that it hopes to annihilate the emotions it describes as it describes them, and an absolute subjugation to those emotions and the world of longing they conjure up. A deep sentimentality, not relieved but exacerbated by a further (ultimate) sentimentality about language – call it belief in the arbitrariness of the sign.

See also earlier posts: on Clark (Cafe Concerts), Eliot, Greenberg's snobbery (and cultural insecurity) and Marie Lloyd. All now plugged into the paper.
In order of appearance:
One
Two

See also the previous post
The artist as preacher, side show barker, and snake oil salesman. The Confidence Man.
"Artists. All Charlatans." (Flaubert)
"Men let your wallets flop out/ 
And women open your purses!"

...Webcor, Webcor

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The manuscript is linked on the right side of this page, and here.

Jeff Wall: [Referring to Delacroix] Violence is only a theme in this kind of art; the art itself isn’t violent. That makes it very different from, even opposed to, the art of the avant-garde, which expresses aggression against the idea of art itself. This aggression is no longer viable. I don’t think its necessary or possible to go beyond the idea of bourgeois art -that is of autonomous art- towards a fusion of art and its context. Or if its possible it isn’t very desirable. We have learned how the aggression against autonomous art was consistent with aspects of totalitarianism, from the Stalinist period for example, and how state violence could benefit from that kind of aesthetic. The concept of art as autonomous, and therefore less amenable to that kind of instrumentalization, is a central concern of the modern, and I’m most sympathetic to that.

A-MB/RM: Modernity and avant-garde, to you, are two separate things?

JW: We can’t confuse them anymore.

"A Democratic, a Bourgeois Tradition of Art: a Conversation with Jeff Wall" 
Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews

No choice

Prominent Hebrew University demographer Sergio Della Pergola recently told the Jerusalem Post that Jews already constitute just under 50% of the population in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip combined. In effect, a Jewish minority rules over a majority population that includes 1.4 million Palestinian (second-class) citizens of Israel, 2.5 million Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and another 1.5 million under siege in the open-air prison known as the Gaza Strip. All credible projections show that Palestinians will be the decisive majority within a few years.

[reusing old graphics]


From the paper [see the link on the right side of the page]

Again: the problem isn’t one of Analytic or Continental philosophy any more than one of (academic) left or right. The problem is philosophy itself: the placing of ideas over their enactment. If in the beginning was the word, then our world begins with God. If in the beginning was the act, then it begins with us. The Derridean critique of Logocentrism is little more than a critique of those who would be speak before their maker. Derrida is an exegete for whom secular literature is parasitic. Even when he could have been direct and to the point, as in his dismemberment more than deconstruction of John Searle’s arguments, in the essays published in Limited Inc, his indirectness shows as little more than the false modesty of an ostentatiously self-deprecating priest, constantly referring to a higher authority. His ‘performance’ as an author reminds me of my mother’s painfully deferential attitude when playing Bach; painful precisely because of her refusal to perform, as if to do so would be to usurp his authority. Derrida’s philosophy is as opposed to art as is any other form of Modernist intellectualism. How does his whispering discussion of “…the other” fit with the vulgar realities of theater or law? If an actor plays Macbeth, a fictional character, written by William Shakespeare, where’s the self? Can you imagine the theater reviews of Derridean passivity as applied to Hamlet? Deconstruction is nothing but the manifestation of hypertrophied individualism, overdetermined and under analyzed, glossed-over by the sincere desire to be something more. And sincerity is like intention, meaningless. Better the powerful insincerity of Olivier or a trial lawyer at the bar. Better philosophically, better politically.

The contemporary “theory of art”, if not of literature, music or film, begins not with art but with philosophy, with an individualism that’s foreign to the arts. The aristocratic arts have become bureaucratized to match the intellectual aristocracy of management. It was popular until recently in art/intellectual circles to argue against “mastery”, not against mindless technique in favor of communicative skill –not against Jazz fusion and for Charlie Parker or against Yes and for the Clash- but against craft as such in favor of the moral and intellectual mastery of ideas and the mind. And this bookish authoritarianism when allied to the pretensions of the academic bourgeois, left and middle, was called truth. th. In the acknowledgements of her intellectual biography of Clement Greenberg aptly titled ‘Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses , Caroline A. Jones thanks Benjamin Buchloh, historian, critic, and theoretician of high-seriousness in contemporary art, for his “stimulating aperçu regarding the ‘administrative sensibility’ of post-Greenbergian conceptual art.” It’s left at that.

It should be clear by now my point is that craft is less individualist than reason, whether the reason of the analytics or of the craftiness of theory, though as I’ve said, foreign thought is less translated than transliterated. And its readership is barely more sophisticated than Donald Davidson in his arguments against “conceptual schemes”. Americans are naïve about themselves. European socialists and social democrats are not American liberals and the writings of academics enamored of French theory are no more French than Johnny Hallyday is Elvis. Middle class Europe took working class America and made it sophisticated, removing the vulgarity. American middle class vulgarity takes European sophistication and replicates it in the university and mall. American theory is bureaucratized and humorless, self-indulgent and childish. It’s anti-cultural. Derrida was engaged as the product of culture. He was a priest. The argument against him, and its damning, is that he’s trying to use the language of the high church, or the high temple, to describe democratic responsibility, trying to reconcile a univocal God with a multivocal world. But the moral law of democracy says that meanings don’t come from God, or from above, but from below. 

The aristocratic arts can’t represent or defend democracy any more than science can. Which is why in Europe unlike the US the aristocratic tradition still plays a role. The model of the intellectual as Bourgeois-Anti-Bourgeois or of the high and low against the middle, includes elements that are both radical and reactionary, and people are unafraid to criticize the banalities of democratic culture as they see it. This doesn’t happen so openly in the US and when it does, the superiority of the aristocrat, flaneur, or connoisseur is transformed into the snobbery of the technocrat and expert, even the expert in French theory. The insouciance of the boulevardier becomes the pedantry of middle management.

What is pure art according to the modern idea? It is the creation of an evocative magic, containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself.

What is Philosophical Art according to the ideas of Chenavard and the German school? It is a plastic art which sets itself up in place of books, by which I mean as a rival to the printing press in the teaching of history, morals and philosophy.
-Baudelaire

Our works will not be judged for what we want from them but for what they appear be in others’ eyes. Numbers model but language represents. Formal structures can be tightly structured but their relation to the world is fluid. The authors of the Constitution understood that. Foucault understood that more than Derrida. The American intellectualism of bureaucracy, of theory and philosophy, of Social Text and Quine, doesn’t understand it at all. ----
Monet's sell high at auction because they’re pretty not because they’re important, which is not to say that they aren’t both. Warhol sells for glamour not for terror, though their relation was his theme. That’s how the market for valuable commodities works. ...

Holbrooke

Ron Vawter on One Life to Live.
The Wooster Group
[Thanks Clay]

Friday-Fucking-Lunch-Club
(every-fucking-day)

Arguing with law professors comment removed
[all the comments are now stripped. I don't think I was arguing with Pasquale]

"Italian rules allowing candy makers including Nestle SA to label their products as “pure chocolate” breach European Union law, the region’s highest court said.

Permitting chocolate made from pure cocoa butter to be called “cioccolato puro,” or “pure chocolate,” clashes with EU-wide measures which allow chocolate laced with vegetable fats to be marketed as chocolate, the tribunal in Luxembourg said."

German roofers were under pressure from the EU a few years ago because in Germany you were not allowed to start your own company without 7 or 8 years of experience, and other countries were far less strict. But German roofers were considered the best in Europe. At the same time small batch cheese makers in Switzerland are under pressure now from industrial cheese manufacturers in Germany, who buy up all the milk.

Brad DeLong has come out in favor of cardboard tomatoes for the masses.

you have to either live in the countryside or live in the city and be really rich to say that rubber tomatoes suck. For those humans who live in the city and are not really rich, rubber tomatoes provide a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience.

The foundation of democracy is in citizens having and understanding conflicting interests: self-interest/fraternity, greed/pride, the obligations of a soldier/the obligations of a citizen [in a democracy those are opposed]. I know men who've sold for many millions, over decades,  to multimillionaires and billionaires, but who aren't more than millionaires themselves. For themselves, enough's enough. They're proud of what they sell. I was raised to know there's greed in the world. I was raised to think that greed is vulgar and a waste of time. Realism is realism concerning others; Yes? Were you raised to hold yourself to a higher standard? Maybe not. Neoliberalism says there is no higher standard, that non-contradictory law/contract is all there needs to be. [see: democracy, above]

And since you're linking to a discussion on your own page: Rawls was an idiot. The essence of law in a democracy is the practice of adversarialism: public argument. There is no "truth" beyond process. Philosophy is not foundational it's parasitic. But philosophy is foundational to neoliberalism.

I hope that answers your questions. Maybe now we can talk about democracy in Egypt and US support for kings, dictators and Israel. Zionism is racism (and liberal Zionism is an oxymoron).
Simple logic.

SUBJECT: THE GREAT GAME, IN MESOPOTAMIA: IRAQ AND ITS
NEIGHBORS, PART I

...SAUDI ARABIA -- ANTI-SHIISM AS FOREIGN POLICY?
Iraqi officials view relations with Saudi Arabia as among their most problematic, although they are usually careful with U.S. officials to avoid overly harsh criticism, given our close relations with the Saudis.

SUBJECT: TERRORIST FINANCE:
... [D]onors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.

Other countries watching this exchange will marvel at Washington's weakness. A nominal U.S. ally that receives $1.5 billion in annual aid makes a mockery of democratic rights -- and is answered with mild and low-level expressions of regret and promises to do nothing other than "raise concerns where appropriate." The Obama administration appears to be thoroughly intimidated by Hosni Mubarak - when what it ought to be worried about is who or what will succeed him ."

FLC
The cognitive dissonance in the US press on foreign policy matches that on tax cuts and the deficit. Or maybe it's just that sham elections make it harder to ignore corruption. Or maybe it's just that sham elections are a sign of weakness, and weakness makes people nervous. People are impressed by the Saudis and by Republicans, and not afraid to show contempt for Mubarak and Democrats. The Darwinism of the schoolyard.

"The political men of Greece, who lived under popular government, did not know any other force capable of preserving it than virtue. Those of our own day speak to us of nothing but manufacturing, commerce, finance, wealth, and even luxury."

Montesquieu, On the Spirit of the Laws

Hitchcock. The Lodger, 1927

Taruskin [it all begins here]

About ten years ago I received out of the blue an offprint of an article from the University Pennsylvania Law Review called Law, Music, and Other Performing Arts, by Professors Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas and Jack Balkin of Yale. It was ostensibly a review of Authenticity and Early Music a collection of essays edited by Nicholas Kenyon, then the editor of Early Music magazine, and published by Oxford University Press in 1988 to which I had contributed. I read it with fascination and gratitude, the latter simply because the authors had so well understood the position I had taken in the debates about what was then known as authentic performance practice. in music My musical and musicological colleagues seemed unable to hear what I was really saying when I said that their ideas of historical performance practice, on which the. claim of authenticity was based, derived from a selective reading of history in the service of a modern -or, more strongly, a modernist- ideology. They thought I was claiming that what they were doing was incorrect or misguided or deceitful; but what I meant to imply (and even said outright on occasion) was that their accomplishment was actually far more important and authentic than they claimed or even realized, since it made them the authentic voice of their time, which was our time.

…In their review Levinson and Balkin focused on the claim of privilege to which proponents of "authenticity" felt themselves entitled by virtue of their superior knowledge (or so they claimed) of composers' intentions. The law professors understood that my strictures were not addressed only to this particular claim of privilege but to any and all such claims that sought to circumvent the judgment and preferences of listeners-that is, those most immediately affected by performance decisions. They understood and endorsed my equation of the authenticists' claim to objective knowledge of history with the modernist claim to objective knowledge of musical structure, and my contentions, first, that no one's knowledge of cultural artifacts can be the product of anything other than interpretation; second, that all interpretations are to be judged on a continuum; and third, that the only proper judges are living listeners, not dead authorities, be they composers, theorists, or instrument builders.

All works of art. I argued (and they agreed), are subject to social mediation. It is, indeed, the price of living. Social mediation is what renders works of art intelligible, and it is what gives them continuing relevance, And social mediation inevitably changes whatever it mediates. There can be no appeal to a higher authority, I said (and they agreed), and any attempt at such an appeal is in fact a covert assertion of the appellant's own authority, I wanted to hug them when I read the sentence I am about to quote, which so succinctly encapsulated everything I had been trying to say. "His complaint is that authenticists, like other ideologues, try to discredit competing presentations as 'incorrect' or, indeed, incompetent, when the proper focus should be on whether the performances are more or less enjoyable and artistically effective." Yes indeed, and doesn't it seem obvious. Ought it to require a musicologist and a pair of legal scholars to come up with such a truism? Maybe not, but apparently it does.

We define the present according to our values. You can argue if you want that our values are determined by material reality and that "intention" is illusion, but you cannot argue that ignoring questions of value solves the problem. If it did than being a "moderate" in the present in the US would be no different than being a moderate in 1939 in Berlin.